Skill Sharpening

Had the opportunity to do a little Gming this weekend, and I have to say it went better than I expected. My wife decided to go scrapbooking for the night on Friday so I took the night off as a chance to gather a few players and 1) play test my game system further, 2) hone my waning GM skills.

I had started a little Zombiegeddon game last Halloween just as a between session filler and for a little seasonal gaming. And to be honest, I needed a break from sword & sorcery gaming for a little while. I love D&D and fantasy settings, but once in a while I need to play something different or I get burned out and everything starts to blend together. 

My Powers are Fading

A long time again, on a PC far far away I used to play Ultima Online, one of the first and, in my humble opinion, one of the best MMORPGs ever made. 

It ran on a system of skill points. Each character could gain up to 700 points divided among all the available skills to a maximum of 100 in each. As you performed certain tasks, that skill had a chance of being increased do to usage. The funny thing was, if you had already gained all 700 skill points and gained another point in a skill, it would take a point away from your least used skill. This was to simulate an atrophy of skills that are hardly used in favor of those that are used often.

Maybe I'm amazed...

After 31 years of gaming, how am I still surprised by what players do?

So as an interlude, and a way of play testing my game system, some of the players in my group agreed to let me teach them my system and run them through a small adventure.

Being a little worn out on the fantasy genre, I decided to run a zombie-pocalypse adventure. I knew we had our Pathfinder break coming up a couple of weeks in advance so I had time to really plan something interesting with character back stories and location maps and the works. 

There were 5 players and me: A scientist, a contract killer, an MMA fighter, a traveling biker with a haunted past, and an EMT. None of the character's knew each other and none of the players knew what the game was going to be about so I gave them their backgrounds, all of which led them to a Red Robin near my house, and put them in their own locations in the restaurant.

How Many Attributes are TOO Many Attributes

I was reading a post from JB over at B/X BLACKRAZOR about character attributes and how many are too many in his opinion. While I agree with him in principal that too many attribute can become cumbersome and tedious, I find myself designing a game system that has 10 attributes.